Accents and children

[leigh2209]

I hesitate to post this message as I know it's a subject that elicits strong opinions but I would really welcome your views and any advice people might have.

My wife and I are currently raising our 2 year old daughter here and I'm really worried that our daughter will pick up a Leeds accent. I quite like accents but to be completely honest, I really dislike the Yorkshire accent!

I was born in the North but have moved around all my life and am told I speak without an accent. My wife is not from the UK and English isn't her first language. She speaks English beautifully though and has a subtle and charming accent. I'd really like my daughter to 'speak nicely' too but don't see how this is realistically possible if we stay here! I'm afraid we can't afford to send her to a private school. What can we do apart from move before she gets much older? Elocution lessons? Any ideas?

My main goals as a parent are that my daughter grows up a kind, considerate person and that she's happy. How she speaks is of no real importance but I would like to raise my daughter to speak lovely clear English without a strong accent.

I worked in Leeds for only 5 years, by the end of which my strong Cumbrian twang had morphed into a Yorkshire/Cumbria hybrid.

So yep, your daughter is going to have a Leeds accent!

On the other hand my children eat with a knife and fork like Europeans - not americans so we did influence that
What's the difference?

Why does it bother you if she has an accent?

It is disconcerting to have a child who speaks English in a very different accent to you. Nothing snobbish about it -it just feels odd. Obviously you have to get over it but it is an odd experience.

sleeping my children hold their knife in their right hand and their fork in their left and cut their food and transport it to their mouths with the fork (in the left hand - and mostly tines down).

Americans by and large cut their food with knife and fork in right and left hands, then put down the knife, transfer fork to right hand and scoop food up twith the fork tines up.

It is a perfectly reasonable way to eat and isn't unpleasant to watch in any way but I am so glad my children eat like me - god knows why.

Obviously all the instructions above are reversed for left-handed people.

Obviously all the instructions above are reversed for left-handed people
Nah, right handed peoe eat backwards. I eat right handed cos my left hand, who is smarter than rightie, navigates up to my mouth better. Rightie is dumb blunt cutting force 🤣

It is disconcerting to have a child who speaks English in a very different accent to you.

Not for everyone. I'm northern and my daughter has a Gloucestershire accent. She'll go on the Bouncy 'carstle' etc. I like it. It's her.

It's probably not a good idea to live somewhere if you don't want your child to sound like a local.

I'm American and my 2 yr old DS already very clearly has an English accent....despite me being a SAHM until 2 months ago. They don't learn it at home, that's for sure.

You mentioned that your children were all privately educated though. Do you really think that this has had no bearing?

I do. My DC's schools were both fairly local so plenty of local MC kids most with Yorkshire accents, some pretty strong - think, Bradford and environs, Halifax, etc. Mine were often referred to as 'speaking posh' ie. with a neutral, home counties/RP type accent. You may find they modify their accent a bit with their peers (as I did living in Scotland as a child), reverting to their usual accent at home and in other social situations.

Not for everyone. I'm northern and my daughter has a Gloucestershire accent. She'll go on the Bouncy 'carstle' etc. I like it. It's her.

That's interesting.

I have one DC who uses completely Southern vowels, speaking very much like me, one with harly any accent but short vowels, and the third with a more noticeable Yorkshire accent and short vowels.

Not for everyone. I'm northern and my daughter has a Gloucestershire accent. She'll go on the Bouncy 'carstle' etc. I like it. It's her.

yes but you notice it - that is what I mean. It is different. I don't have a problem with my kids' accent - it is them. But it does feel odd sometimes to have them sound so different to us. We've done a fair few holidays in the UK and I wonder (well not that much) about people hearing two obviously Irish people with 3 obviously US kids - all sorts of different presumptions being made.

Maybe the OP is being snobbish. Maybe not. But it is a thing for many of us who are rearing children in places with radically different accents than our own.

I have a neutral northern accent, thanks to living in lots of places (including Leeds when I was at university), DH a lovely soft Irish accent. DC started off with a quite RP accent as we lived in the home counties. Then we moved to Ireland, DH's home country, and within two weeks of mixing with their Irish cousins & local children the home counties accent was gone - replaced with a nice, gentle west of Ireland accent similar to DH's. Though they can switch back to English accents in a nano second, depending on their audience - but funnily enough it's my Northern accent, not the one from where we used to live. So I suppose I'm saying that children will inevitably pick up the local accent but they will still be influenced by how their parents speak.

I’m in the south and I know a German family whose children speak with a fairly strong German accent still (they speak German in the home), and a boy whose DM is from the north who says bath, grass rather than barth, grahss etc.

So while I agree with most posters that peers will have a big influence, you and your wife will have some. It’s a good accent though IMO. As to it making you sound less intelligent, I know a girl who is incredibly clever and who speaks with a very broad Yorkshire accent; if you thought it at all at the start of any convo with her, you would have dropped the prejudice by the end.

I also think it depends on whether you are one of those people that just morphs accent really easily... often I have a local twang just at the end of a holiday but on the plus side I’m pretty good at impersonations.

This one is easy.

Home school and let her watch loads of tv. Apparently accents are slowly dying out in general as kids are getting Americanised. You could fast forward the process.

Apparently accents are slowly dying out in general as kids are getting Americanised.

But there are different American (and Canadian) accents represented on TV, too, so that one might not work?

An endless loop of Brideshead Revisited playing in the background might do it, perhaps.

The obsession with 'not having an accent' (which is completely impossible unless you are mute) is mind boggling to me. What with an accent being totally different to not speaking properly. Are Scottish, Irish, American and Australian accents also deemed to be indicative of poor speech or is it only certain English accents?

You don't get to choose I'm afraid. But singing really helps, proper choral singing - everyone says my kids sound really posh but it's just good diction and elocution from singing not where we live, they don't sound like their non singing friends

You're just going to have to move to somewhere that fits with your aspirations of social class I'm afraid. Clearly Yorkshire just won't cut it.

She will grow up with a Leeds accent but she will have the ability to, 'put on' your accent and your wife's.

My neighbours moved from |London, their grandchildren (kids live with gran) speak to Gran in a London accent and Yamyam to their friends.

I had Northern parents but went to school in the South and adopted Southern vowels. I then moved North to teach and had to use Northern vowels to teach phonics (finding u as in umbrella particularly difficult). I think I have a fairly bland accent but my sister, still Southern, thinks I sound Northern but Northerners think I sound Southern. What will be will be.

I agree with whoever said accents are evening out due to TV as the children's accent where I am is much less marked than it was 30 years ago. One of my grandsons watched Peppa Pig on a loop when he was little and his speech (he's 10 now) is very posh - try that!

Whether accent ‘matters’ depends on where you land in life, in my experience. In some kind universities and professions you will stand out like a sore thumb with a non RP accent, and that can have a negative impact on your self-image and possibly your credibility and progression at work (although it shouldn’t and is unacceptable).

In other settings an RP accent will mark you out as ridiculously posh and out of place, and attract piss-taking.

I always wonder if the people who say accent doesn’t matter have never strayed far from where they grew up. It shouldn’t matter, but unfortunately people are judged by it one way or the other all the time.

And I’d agree, DH and I speak with a standard English accent but out kids are definitely picking up the local accent (dropped T and H, missing out the definite article ‘I need to go toilet’). We correct constantly, hoping they can then tell the difference between standard and non-standard usage 🤷‍♀️

What is difficult to get your head round while your child is still a toddler is that they will grow up into totally different people with their own identities and their own sense of where they belong and that you will have time to get used to this.

Both our children grew up in the same w/c part of town and attended the same state schools. Dd speaks in a very RP accent which comes across as "posh" to some people. She sounds posher than either dh or me tbh. She is also a very cosmopolitan kind of person, moved to London as soon as she could, mixes with people from a wide variety of backgrounds. She is very open to different accents and works on trying to learn them (actress), but I kind of assume the reason she didn't end up with a strong local accent was, she was not that happy where she grew up.

Ds otoh is very strongly tied to place and to him his local accent is very much part of his identity. With the life he is aiming at (skilled worker), this will almost certainly be more of a help than a hindrance.

Our family is also bilingual and bicultural: dh and I have different first languages, children speak both. Neither child is particularly like either dh or me in personality and aspirations. It's all cool.

As for those posters worrying that "you will notice it", yes, I do notice that dd sounds as if she had stepped off a BBC news broadcast. But I don't find it disconcerting, any more than I find it disconcerting that her hair is brown and mine is blond, or that she is slim and elegant whereas I am more the dumpy peasant type.

Many factors influence how children speak and I think the strongest influence is the primary caregiver in the early years. I was born and brought up in the West Country, attended a village primary school and a comprehensive school, but speak with an RP accent like my mother (who was born and brought up in the Home Counties). My father had a strong Lancashire accent.

My children mainly have an RP accent, but pronounce some words in the American way.

Crikey, a Leeds accent is the least of your worries. Imagine Essex or Brummie or broad west country. These are perceived in a far poorer light by the rest of the country. Just ensure your DC speak grammatically correctly. Otherwise it really sounds quite snobbish

If you live in Leeds and speak with RP you are going to sound ridiculous.

However, if you leave Leeds to live elsewhere in the country and speak with a slight Leeds accent (and proper grammar and diction) you will sound fine.

Yorkshire accents are generally quite well thought of - it's why a lot of call centres are based there.

I had elocution lessons. After a while I realised what was going on and changed all my barths and parths back to baths and paths. I am told I speak with a neutral accent, but with a slight North-West bias, despite not having lived there since I was 2 - just shows the effect your parents have on your accent (and when you realise that you don't want to talk with an RP accent).

I think it is possible to not have an accent - I remember meeting someone who said she'd had her Liverpool accent surgically removed. You'd never have guessed she was from there originally and I can pick it up immediately as my mum is from there.

@pallisers

My PIL are both very very Irish. All 5 of their children have a different accent due to living in different parts of Africa. But they use the same sayings. It's lovely to hear